SMB201IntermediateBreakout sessionSmall & Medium Business Playbook 2 live updates

The AI-Driven Development Lifecycle: How Skyjed Shipped in 48 hours

What this session is about

Traditional AI-assisted development treats AI as a tool. The AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AI-DLC) treats it as a central collaborator throughout the development process. In this session, join Skyjed CTO Stephen Brown, to share how his team applied AI-DLC to compress a 4-6 week implementation into 48 hours. Discover how AI-DLC's three phases — Inception, Construction, and Operations — reimagines the software lifecycle through AI-powered execution with human oversight and dynamic team collaboration. Drawing on Skyjed's firsthand experience on integrating AI-assisted development into their existing software development lifecycle, this talk explores how team collaboration, Kiro-powered workflows, and enterprise-grade code development practices were enhanced rather than replaced. You'll walk away with practical steps to achieve 1520x accelerationwithout sacrificing quality, governance, or control.

Playbook

Editorial commentary · what to actually do about this on Monday

The concept
AI-DLC's three phases: Inception, Construction, Operations. Kiro-powered workflows. 15–20× acceleration claimed against pre-AI baseline.
Why it matters
This roughly matches Xero's claim from Day 1. The pattern is now validated by multiple companies.
The hard parts
15–20× is achievable on right-fit work. Wrong-fit work doesn't compress meaningfully.
Playbook moves
(1) Identify work classes that suit AI-DLC: well-spec'd features, brownfield with clear context. (2) Avoid: greenfield with uncertain requirements. (3) Track actual compression ratio per project type.
The surprise
AI-DLC's three-phase split (Inception / Construction / Operations) is the tell that the methodology has matured. Earlier "AI coding" framings collapsed everything into "code faster." This separates concerns properly. The phase boundaries are where the discipline lives. ---

Independent editorial perspective — not an official AWS or speaker statement. Designed for executives evaluating what to brief their teams on next.